This week in Brexitland, November 5, 2021
This week, instead of taking three or four topics related to Brexit and breaking them down, I’m doing a special look only at the Owen Paterson fiasco.
To re-cap, Owen Paterson, who at the start of the week was the MP for North Shropshire, had been found guilty of ‘egregiously breaching’ the rules around lobbying by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. This would have required a 30-day suspension from parliament for Paterson and the possibility (and likelihood) of recall. The House of Commons would get a vote on this, but that was nothing more than a rubber stamp; although democracy dictates that the suspension be ratified by parliament, all parties had agreed to abide by the findings of the PCS.
But, as ever, Boris Johnson found an agreement he didn’t like and looked for a way to back out of it. He decided, madly in retrospect, to three-line whip his MPs into not only voting against Mr Paterson’s 30-day suspension, but to eliminate the PCS altogether, to be replaced by some new fangled committee doing ostensibly the same thing only in a more Boris Johnson-friendly manner.
Most of you will have no sympathy for Owen Paterson and I’m not going to try and tell you here that you should. But it is worth looking at how he was treated by the prime minister over this past week simply to understand Boris Johnson better. Paterson was essentially told that his career in parliament was safe; that the PM was whipping his entire party in order to spare his blushes. Don’t worry, Owen, the Tory party has you covered.
And then, a day later, Paterson is thrown under the bus. It is Boris Johnson’s whole political life in miniature: do something rash with the notion that even if it blows up, he’ll be all right and further, anyone else who was involved will take the hit, not him. Again, I don’t feel sorry for Paterson here given the circumstances, but he was treated deplorably by the leader of his party.
What does any of this have to do with Brexit, you might ask, given the title of this Substack? Extracting Brexit from Boris Johnson’s political career and ambitions is pretty much impossible. Without Johnson’s desire for power, we very likely wouldn’t be out of the European Union right now, for a start. As a result, watching this same pattern play out over and over again is interesting as to the future of Brexit.
For instance, if Johnson thought it was in his political interests to put Britain back inside the single market, would he? Of course he would. Now, the problem here is it is very unlikely that this ever will be in his political interests given the strength of the Brexit religion coursing through the ranks of the Conservative party. But it is a reminder that the political age we live in is much more fragile than almost any political commentator seems to reflect.
I think because the size of the Tory victory in 2019 made it so that we had the first proper, thumping win for any party since 2005 - and even that didn’t seem like it at the time given Labour had lost 48 seats - after years of hung parliaments and wafer thin majorities, there is this lazy assumption that everything has settled down again and we’re in a new age of political certainties. I don’t know if we really are. Look at Brexit - it just refuses to die. And for good reason, given it was rushed, with the UK government signing up to a bunch of stuff it just assumed it would try and get out of at a later date.
I think Boris Johnson will still be prime minister come the next general election - although, I’m far from 100% on that score, given something like Wallpapergate might be big enough to blow him down - but will he win that election? Probably, but I don’t feel as certain as a lot of other people seem to be. I think the Tory majority from 2019 is much shakier and circumstantial than a lot of Westminster seems to assume. I’m not saying any of this out of a sense of optimism either - just an observation that what seems to be certain one day in British politics becomes the opposite, sometimes in the course of a single day.
If you doubt that, just ask Owen Paterson.